Swiss Chard: A Flavor of Its Own

When I ran out of refrigerated greens today, I decided to make a stir-fried dinner with some Swiss chard. The gardening manuals say you can start picking outer leaves off the chard plants after they reach six to eight inches in height, and a few of my plants had already grown a foot high, so it was time to sample the stuff.

I’ve read in many places that chard is something of a miracle plant. It grows tall and luxuriant through the heat of summer, long after the spinach flags and the lettuce starts to bolt. It can be eaten (they say) raw or cooked, and can serve as a replacement for spinach in many dishes. To all of that, I say “Ha!”

Lush and verdant though my plants may be, they are not at all similar to spinach, and that’s as it should be. Swiss chard is not, after all, closely related to spinach. It is a member of a beet family, a kind of great-aunt to our modern-day beets, the lone remnant from a time when beet family plants were grown for their leaves rather than their roots. While spinach is tender, chard is tough. Its leaves are much chewier than spinach leaves, and they have a much higher concentration of salt.

Since I am not among those who like to eat chewy, salty leaves raw, I prefer to cook my chard. It takes very little effort to soften those leaves and mitigate the salt flavor—just a minute or two of sautéing or steaming. Even then, though, Swiss chard tastes very little like spinach. It doesn’t have quite the same quality of sweetness mixed with bitterness. I like the flavor for itself, a slightly bitter, slightly salty taste that spurts onto the tongue, for the stems of Swiss chard retain a juicy springiness if they are cooked just until tender.

My favorite gardening manual, Home Grown: Growing What You Eat and Preserving What You Grow, by Denys de Saulles, says the individual leaves of Swiss chard should be pulled, not cut, because they bleed when cut. Accordingly, I pulled three leaves from the outer edges of three different plants, with no apparent ill effects to the plants (other than the loss of the leaves, which, if they had any feelings about the matter, they would have keenly resented). They were big, substantial leaves shaped like Chinese fans, yet their stems were still thin and elegant, unlike the hard, wide stems of the Swiss chard I had bought in grocery stores.

They are gone now, of course. I sautéed them with a section of thinly sliced kielbasa, a single clove of garlic (minced), some delicate strips of zucchini, chopped basil, and some chives, then mixed the whole stir-fry with spaghetti, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I ate the mixture in two installments, and the Swiss chard held up well after being reheated in the microwave. It’s not a miracle, but it serves well in any dish that requires something green, flavorful, and vaguely crunchy. Better yet, it looks really impressive in the garden, and the big, boxy seeds are easy to grow. If you want to look successful, plant Swiss chard (and protect it from the bunnies).